


the truth is on the table

by telm_393



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety Attacks, Brief Self-Harm, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Guilt, Heart-to-Heart, Hopeful Ending, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Past Child Abuse, Post-Season/Series 05, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-14 19:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29547471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: It's John's birthday. In somewhat related news, he might be having a nervous breakdown, and he's not sure how much longer he can live like this. Sara does what she can.(Some things aren't fixable, but they also aren't always a total loss.)
Relationships: John Constantine & Sara Lance
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	the truth is on the table

**Author's Note:**

> For the purposes of this fic, please assume Sara got rescued from the aliens in short order and all the Legends who were there at the end of s5 are together doing their thing. 
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy this very earnest entry in my experiment, "how many different mental health crises can I write John Constantine having before it gets weird?" 
> 
> Mind the tags; our POV character really isn't doing great and his trains of thought are pretty consistently going way off-track. 
> 
> The title is from "Rut" by The Killers, because I finally wrote a fic where that song totally works.

John’s at one of the tables in the galley with a half-smoked cigarette in his mouth, flanked by an empty whiskey bottle and a half-full one, when Sara finds him. 

She groans. 

She hasn’t noticed the distant look in his glassy eyes and the ragged state of him, then, though he’s wearing a shirt he hasn’t changed in three days and trousers he’s been sleeping in. He only ventured out of his room for some whiskey, but he got caught up in his drinking, and now he’s here and it’s funny, really, that Sara hasn’t noticed he looks half-dead. Maybe he’s not so badly off. Maybe he looks better than he thinks he does. 

He hasn’t exactly been looking in the mirror, even today when he deigned to take a shower and shave. 

(Has to look nice for his birthday, doesn’t he? In spite of changing back into his dirty clothes. Oversight.) 

Thing is, he doesn’t know what John-in-the-mirror, the wanker, might say to him, and he can’t exactly afford to break the bathroom mirror again. This time he gets the feeling it’d be harder to talk himself out of trouble, especially given how long he’s spent in his room. Not enough to raise alarms at the moment, clearly, but maybe enough if there were a broken mirror involved.

A broken mirror, or a cigarette.

John takes a deep drag and blows the smoke in Sara’s direction. 

She narrows her eyes. “Put it out, John,” she snaps. “You’re the one who wants to quit.”

“No, I’m not,” John says, which isn’t true most of the time but is at this moment. Sara gives him a flat look in response, and he concedes. “All right, I’ll put it out,” he says even as he sticks the cigarette back in his mouth and gives her a wide smile around it in lieu of saying _fuck you_. Sara frowns. Now there’s concern in the curve of her mouth. He’s acting strange. 

_More miserable than usual._

He hates himself for spending the past couple weeks doing everything in his power to stay up when it turns out he was just gonna throw in the towel when May 10th came around anyway. What a day to be bloody docked. John could use some time in the temporal zone right about now. Maybe he should’ve said something, but then the others would’ve asked questions, and he’d have had to leave his room. 

John takes out the cigarette, holding it in his right hand. He blows smoke at Sara again, keeping his gaze locked on her. “I’ll put it out,” he repeats, his smile only getting bigger. “Just like Dad used to.”

Sara’s expression morphs from wariness into something bordering on panic, even though John’s almost sure that he’s never told her about his dad and the cigarettes. Probably Sara's just bright enough to figure it out on her own, since she knows his dad was a shit person. 

Not that any understanding or lack thereof matters, in the end, because John doesn’t listen when Sara says, “John, _wait!”_

Instead, he stabs the cigarette into the crook of his right elbow and grinds it in, grinning the whole time. 

He is well-aware that he looks completely unhinged, and he basks in it. 

Sara, for her part, lurches forward and grabs his right wrist, pinning it down on the table. The cigarette slips from his newly imprisoned arm and rolls onto the table. John doesn’t care.

He stares down at the crook of his left elbow, breathing heavily through his clenched teeth and admiring the burn he’s gifted himself for his birthday. 

It’s very ugly and surrounded by ashes, much like John himself, a fair amount of the time.

“A regular ring-’round-the-rosie, innit?'' he says before he notices his entire body shaking. He swallows. “Huh. Think my pain tolerance for these has gone down since I was a kid. Ain’t that just pathetic?”

Sara’s still pinning his wrist to the table, and John says, “Sharpie comes in, she’ll think there’s somethin’ untoward happening, love.”

He looks up at Sara, eyes unfocused, and she just gives him a stiff shake of her head. “Don’t, John,” she says in a voice that isn’t harsh but isn’t kind either. “Let’s go.”

John makes a face. “Go where? All the good liquor’s here.”

Sara rolls her eyes. John’s vision is too blurry to get a good read on her, but her shoulders are tense and the line of her mouth is...sad, maybe. Stressed. It makes John feel kind of terrible, but he already feels kind of terrible. He hurts people by being himself. It’s important for everyone to know that.

Sara speaks, and John loses his train of thought.

“We’re gonna go get Gideon to unburn your arm.”

“No need, cap’n,” John slurs out. “I don’t mind a little burn.” 

“ _I_ mind,” Sara says. “Because this is going to get infected.”

“Infections pass, Lancie.” 

At that, Sara seems to finally lose her patience, but she doesn't leave. Instead she marches over and gathers him up, hauling him to his feet and putting his arm over her shoulders. He’s sloshed and pliant enough that he lets her manhandle him, and all right, yeah, he’s had a lot to drink, if not enough.

“You’re coming with me, and we’re going to fix this.”

John’s chest tightens in response to Sara’s words, and he scoffs. "Some things ain't fixable, love," he says bitterly.

Sara sighs. “I was talking about the burn, John. Not about you.”

John laughs. 

“Right you are, love,” he mumbles, and he lets Sara keep him upright while he stumbles to medical, and then he lets Sara deposit him on one of the medchairs. 

He feels empty. He thinks that if Sara hadn’t hauled him down here, he wouldn’t have tried to leave the galley for the rest of the day. Why would he? He’s already done so much. Showered, shaved, changed back into the clothes he’d already spent days in ( _missed a step, Johnny,_ the orderly in Ravenscar says, _more like I re-did it, innit?_ John responds, they make him change his clothes anyway), got pissed, burned himself, ended up here...

Someone could come by and try to kill him and he knows he wouldn’t even fight back, because today he doesn’t care. 

Drink’s helped with that, a bit. Not as much as usual, he doesn’t think, but it’s something. John doesn’t want to know what he’d be acting like if he weren’t drunk. He wishes he had more whiskey. He doesn’t want to sober up.

(The best thing John’s dad ever gave him was a taste for alcohol.)

Sara clips one of those healing devices around John’s wrist, and John watches the burn slowly fade away. He can’t even tell if it hurts. 

“May 10th,” he mutters. “Wish this day didn’t exist.”

“So this is about your...birthday?” Sara asks. 

“I wasn’t born today,” John says harshly even through his drunken haze. “My mum died today.” He laughs and then leans back against the medchair’s headrest. “Stop hiding from me, Killer, you know what you did,” John mutters to himself. 

Sara starts to say something, but John steamrolls right over her. “Biggest question of my life. Why’d I live when she didn’t?” He looks at Sara, and he’s not smiling anymore. 

He doesn’t know why he’s asking her. No one's ever had an answer.

Sara unclips the bracelet and sighs. “People die in childbirth, John. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Don’t tell me that,” John mutters.

“You asked.” She puts her hand on his shoulder, and he doesn’t try to shrug her off. “Come on. You barely even existed yet. You didn’t murder anyone.”

John snorts. “Sure,” he says, and then he shakes his head, looking to the side where Sara isn’t. “Da was a wanker, but he was right. I deserved everything he did to me, didn’t I?”

The hand on his shoulder clenches as if Sara’s tried to ball her hand into a fist.

“Bloody hell,” he complains half-heartedly. “You trying to add some more injuries for Gideon to fix?”

Sara’s hand relaxes. John’s still not looking at her. 

“Do you actually believe that?” she asks. “About your dad?”

John shrugs. “No. Not always. Not anymore.” He’s heard _you didn’t deserve it, John_ and all the arguments too many times to not believe some of them. “He was probably wrong to do what he did to me. I wouldn’t think it was right if it happened to some other lad, don’t matter why, and I hate him for it for a reason. But he wasn’t wrong about me killing her. I was born, she died. Cause and effect, innit?”

“John…” Sara says, and John snaps.

Maybe he’s starting to sober up, maybe he’s just mad, it doesn’t matter. He sits up suddenly enough that he jars Sara's hand off of his shoulder. He's staring at the space in front of him, but his eyes are unfocused, he can tell because he can't see much of anything. It's not important.

“You don’t understand, Sara,” John grinds out, because she doesn’t and he has so much to explain, now that he’s loose-lipped and clear-headed, in a sense, in the sense that the thoughts he’s been trying to keep away because he’s too much of a coward to have them are coming and he’s not going to stop them, because in spite of how Sara knows him, she still doesn’t understand the truth about him, and it’s high time for confession. 

It’s his birthday and things are bad enough that there must be a reason for exactly how bad they are, especially considering that, when he dwells on it, and he does so often, John’s life has improved. John was happy, even, until a few weeks ago, and then reality set a bomb for May 10th, and now things are shit even though his world is better and it's probably because the universe is warning him that this isn’t what he deserves and it’s his job to sound the alarm before things also go to hell for everyone else. Again.

“I’m not like you,” John tells Sara. “I don’t live through things, I just get through them like a cockroach and I definitely don’t get redemption.”

“Wait. Who says I’m redeemed?” Sara asks, the words coming out thinner than she probably meant them to. “I’ve done horrible things.”

Of course she got stuck on that.

John shrugs. “Extenuating circumstances. And you stopped. You were able to. The damage, your damage—you're not the same, you’re better—” His breath catches.

The problem is that John is different. 

There’s the rest of the world, and then there’s him. There’s no one with the ability to ruin things quite like John Constantine. It’s a curse and so is he. It’s why he’s good at dark magic; he doesn’t have the capacity for anything that doesn’t come from the worst places possible, just like he did. “Me, I can’t stop doing horrible things, even now I’m here I’ll never be able to stop, I’ll break it all again, you’ll see. I break things. I kill things. It’s in my nature, it’s how I was born.” 

John Constantine against the world, the world against John Constantine, an endless battle to fix what he’s broken, to fix what’s broken, to make things right because he might be able to, whatever he did or sometimes didn’t do, and maybe it’ll save him or maybe it’ll save someone else who matters and that’ll mean something, he’ll trick the universe and do something good, even if it’s never enough.

And it’s become obvious that it’s never enough.

He saved Astra. Got his soul coin back. Fixed what he’s been desperate to fix all these years and even found a new crew to run with. He put things to rights, and for a while he was happy because it was over, because he got Astra back and was willing to give everything up for her, his original sin.

But that wasn’t quite right, was it? The horrible things in him didn’t go away, did they? He got his soul back, but his soul has been corrupt since the beginning and _Astra wasn’t his original sin_ , it was just easier to put it that way, easier to manipulate her that way like the bastard he is. 

There were a million sins before Astra like there were a million after, starting with... 

_I never want to see your face again,_ his mum said.

_You won’t._

He wanted so badly to bring her back even though he can’t. That’s not how it works. Can’t just bring someone back from being well and truly dead and gone, that’s become very clear over time, and she wouldn’t want to see him anyway. 

She’d be disappointed in him. She’d hate him, like Nat does. 

Besides, the truth is that after a time, the magic stopped being about his mum, stopped being about bringing her to life and started being about giving him one even as it took every good human thing he had away. 

(In Burbank, Jeanie told him, _Why would I give up this power when I’ve been powerless my whole life?_

And he couldn’t argue, because he agreed.

Because he chose power every time.) 

He was told, once, _she said it wasn’t your fault,_ but he can’t believe it. 

There are things that are too good to be true. 

“I kill things,” John mutters again.

The words resound in his head and in the sterile medbay and somewhere in the past, unfurling into echoing rants of yesteryear, ones he always likes to think he’s forgotten. Because it was a long time ago. Because he doesn’t care anymore. 

His dad was a bastard who was angry at him for killing his mum, so he did things he shouldn’t have done to a child, even one who was a murderer. That’s all. 

Otherwise, John doesn’t even remember.

 _You did this to us, she’s gone, you did this, Killer, that’s for what you did to your mum—Cheryl left because of you, look at what you did to my family you horrible little creature—you broke everything I don’t understand it I don’t understand why you’re alive—will you shut up will you stop screaming you’re driving me mad the neighbors’ll call the fuzz and you know they can’t help us—fucking hell we have to stop the bleeding talk to me boy—drink this it’ll put you right to sleep don’t be a baby it ain’t gonna hurt you this is the kind of thing that helps_...

John swallows heavily. He tastes blood; he thinks he’s been biting his inner lip. 

Damn it. John was trying to avoid this. These memories. These spirals. 

He’s been trying to avoid this for days, weeks, years, maybe. It wasn’t this bad last year or the year before, he doesn’t think, not this pain. It didn't stretch so long. He drank it away.

But he didn’t manage to drink it away this time, and he doesn’t think it’s just because Sara pulled him to medical. 

He suspects that when everything was broken, there wasn't as much space for the old pain in his mess of a mind. But that's what Ray would call a hypothesis, and the truth is he's been trying to kick away the dragging feelings, or lack of feelings, for weeks, but the memories and the fear and the sucking abyss of pitch darkness in him have won. 

He wishes he’d never thought he was happy, wishes he’d never cursed himself thinking life was good, because life is good but it could so easily go bad again. He could make it bad again. He _has_ made it bad again and barely anything even happened except for his whole sorry existence. 

Next year on his birthday, will everything have blown up? Broken? Will it have been his fault? Will he even be around? 

Hell, maybe the world where he isn’t around next May 10th is the best one. 

Yeah. The best outcome: one where he never fucks anything up ever again because he isn’t there to do it. 

He’s always been too afraid to kill himself, to lose control to Hell, but he’s got his soul coin now, so he won’t have to lose control, even if he burns. 

Wait.

No, no, John knows he shouldn’t think like that. He’s old enough to know he shouldn’t think like that.

(But maybe it’d be the right thing to do, a part of him that’s supposed to be unreasonable whispers. Maybe it’d be the easiest thing to do. Maybe it’s inevitable.

This is where his life’s been leading him since he was nine with no sister and a father on the warpath and he put a knife to his wrist for the first time.

He was too scared to do it, then. Didn’t want to get damned to Hell for the sin of suicide.

But he knows better now.)

“I _kill_ things,” John says again, his panic rising, and he’d kind of prefer the apathy that led him to spend three days in bed right about now.

Something’s gone very wrong and John can’t breathe and he needs a drink or a padded room or an electric shock or an icepick to the eye or...

A hand tightens on his shoulder, and he’s momentarily reminded that he’s not alone, and not in the amorphous _oooh, you’re not alone, you’re never alone when you’ve got the monsters in your own head_ kind of way. 

Sara’s here. John’s not sure if that makes the situation worse or better. At the very least he’ll probably get out of this moment intact, and he’s leaning towards that being a good thing. Or he will, when he’s in his right mind, unless he is in his right mind, which would be bloody horrible, given how awful everything is. 

No, it’s not all awful, it’s not all shit, he does his best to remind himself, some of that positive thinking he supposedly learned in the loony bin. 

It’s just all awful right now.

But maybe when today’s over, everything will be okay. Or maybe it won’t be. Maybe this’ll keep dragging on, but it’ll pass like it always has before, or he’ll never be okay again, that’s also a possibility, he’ll never be okay again and that whispering part of him that’s started _screaming_ is right and he’ll just bloody kill himself this time.

“John,” Sara says, an edge of tense concern sharpening her voice, “take a deep breath.”

John’s breaths are short and choppy and gasping. It feels like he’s breathing into an abyss.

He hates these fits, hates how often he's been having them lately, and it stings that this one's in front of someone, though he’s too busy with the cascading, jumbled memories and terrors in his head to feel quite as humiliated as he should yet. 

_Where are you, Killer? Don’t tell me you’re trying to hide from me on this day, boy!_

John jumps off the medchair, unable to sit still. The lethargy that was keeping him melted there is gone and his head is spinning and maybe he should’ve had less to drink. No, he should’ve drunk until he passed out. Vibrating with suppressed panic, he paces to the middle of the room, turns on his heel, and goes to the side, at a loss. He can’t fucking stand this.

Tired of his nonsense, he slaps himself across the face twice, hard as he can. 

“John!” Sara barks out, and she’s in front of him in seconds, both his wrists in her hands. He grimaces, almost flinching, and goes still, closing his eyes.

_What, are you afraid of me, Killer?_

“Take a deep breath,” Sara says again. “Please.”

She sounds a little desperate, but she’s also the only voice in the room that isn’t his or a memory, and he might as well do something for her. That'll look good, maybe, if he does die soon, because somehow he still hopes that Hell isn’t his future, so he tries to take a deep breath. It’s harsh and gasping, but he manages it, and then another. 

The burning in his chest starts to dampen, and it starts to feel like he’s actually breathing into his lungs again, like there are organs in his body instead of some hollowed-out hole. His cheek is aching; it helps bring him back to the present, much as Sara doesn’t like it. He tugs experimentally at his wrists. She holds tight. She doesn’t trust him. She shouldn’t.

“This needs to end,” John whispers to himself. “This needs to end, it needs to…”

“Wait, no, breathe,” Sara says hastily, and John takes a deep, rasping breath. 

He opens his eyes. Sara looks thoroughly freaked out, but she’s trying to keep her face calm, and John appreciates it. Looking at her still makes him start to shake as he's hit with what he has to tell her. He doesn’t think she understood before he started acting like a lunatic, but now he can talk again, and the things he has to say are back too.

“I’m gonna break this,” he whispers. “I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna kill everyone here. Everyone’s gonna die and it’s gonna be because of me. I kill people. I get people killed. I know it, it’s trying to tell me, this whole thing is trying to tell me to...this whole thing…” He trails off, swallowing hard. He probably sounds homicidal. 

Thankfully, Sara knows what’s homicidal and what isn’t, so she just gives him an even look and says, “We can protect ourselves, John. We already have. You’ve been with us for a while now.”

“Not long enough for all the times I've nearly got you lot killed. Got Nate killed, got Behrad killed...”

Sara shakes her head, squeezing his wrists. “Come on. The thing with Nate took two to tango, you can’t put it all on yourself, and it’s not like you choked him. And Behrad...Zari was hurt and she wanted to blame someone. You didn’t kill him, you helped bring him back.” Sara pauses and takes a deep breath like she’s gathering her thoughts. 

John watches her warily, unable to bring himself to interrupt, not when all his words have gotten lost, and waits until she continues. “You say you get everyone killed like no one else ever _does_ anything. You can’t make yourself responsible for everybody’s actions, you’ll drive yourself…” Sara trails off at that, and John scoffs.

“Bad things happen around me, Sara, they do, and it has to be because of me, I’m the one thing that links all of them together, I’m bad luck, the longer I stay the worse it gets, and now, now the bloody universe is trying to tell me I’ve been here too long and I have to, I can’t, I can’t let everything go wrong, I do anything and there’s some bloody disaster and I don’t know what it’ll be, I…”

“John!” Sara says, loudly enough that John’s pushed into silence. “Shut. Up. Take a deep breath and stop. Listen to me.”

John, thrown off and a little stunned by Sara basically yelling in his face, stares at her. He doesn’t take a deep breath, but he’s not hyperventilating, at least, and that’ll have to do.

Sara holds his gaze. Her expression is almost exasperated and more than a little sad, but her words are firm. “You know how we’re always saying not everything’s about you?”

John blinks. Slowly, he nods.

“We’re not wrong,” Sara continues, giving him a rueful smile. “It’s not all about you. There’s a bunch of other people on this ship, and trust me, we live in the exact same universe you do, and John Constantine is not the center of that universe, okay? We can screw up all by ourselves.”

John takes a shaky breath. He nods. Sara’s voice and words are more calming than they have any right to be, and he’s still pretty drunk, and definitely exhausted, and he can breathe again and all of it is coming together to make him admit that Sara’s got a point.

“You’re not a Fate,” Sara says, and John lets out a reluctant laugh, because that’s true. Obviously, that’s true, in spite of everything he’s done. 

Maybe the next disaster won’t be his fault. 

For a moment, he feels calm rather than hollow, and then he falls back to reality, the one where he’s going to have to keep existing past this brief moment of peace, and he’s reminded that he still killed his mum today—no way around that one, his dad said it over and over again because it was true—and he still spent yesterday and the day before and the day before that in the grand converted storage space that is his room and every time he lets himself think too hard his memories overtake him and he needs to get over it.

“But I can’t seem to get over it,” he mumbles to himself. “Any of it. All of it. What’s already happened already happened, and I still have to live with it, and I’m still here, and…”

“Damn it,” Sara says, loud and sudden. John jerks, alarmed, and looks down at her. Her eyes are shining with frustration and pain, and John is distantly confused. He doesn’t know what he did. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. “I thought I was pretty convincing,” she says, voice choked, and John doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

He smiles and a tear drips down his cheek, so he guesses his body’s gone with something in the middle. “It’s not...it’s not only…” He shuts his eyes. “No. Sara, whatever world I’m living in, what’s happening now, whatever it means, and maybe nothing means anything, I don’t know…”

“John, that’s not what I was saying,” Sara starts, and John shakes his head. She doesn’t understand. How can she? He doesn’t either. His thoughts get mixed up in different variations from one moment to the next, and he can’t take it anymore, and he opens his eyes to tell Sara the one thing he knows it's true.

Now it's his turn to yell in her face, so he does. “It’s bad!”

Sara goes silent, looking at him concerned, and he tries to pull away from her to hit himself again so he’ll be able to get himself out of his head, but she holds fast to his wrists and he doesn’t try again. He keeps talking. 

“It’s just bad, and it hasn't been like this in a long time and I need to know why it's happening now! I was in bed the past three days because I couldn’t face it anymore and the only bloody reason I left today was because I’d run out of anything to drink and I couldn’t stand to be in there sober with nothing but myself for company and I felt, I felt disgusting and everything’s so _empty_ in front of me and so bloody _packed_ behind and…”

“John, breathe!”

He takes a deep breath, on cue, and then he’s quiet except for his harsh, shaking breaths. He’s looking over at one of the empty medchairs now, so he won’t have to see Sara’s face. He realizes, without feeling much about it one way or another, that tears are running down his cheeks. He should be embarrassed, but he’s so tired. He's tired of trying to find meaning in this when the truth is right there. 

“I’m really _not_ like you, Sara,” John whispers. “I don’t get better. Even when things around me seem to, I don’t, and if I’m thirty-nine years old and life is supposed to be good and it’s not, if it’s been thirty-nine years and I’m still like this, it’s been thirty-nine years and this is what I am.”

“Hey,” Sara says. “You’re going through a lot right now. But it’s not forever.” The words are awkward but sincere, and John huffs.

“How do you know?” he mutters before a convulsive wave of outright, nineteenth-century-novel despair washes over him and, unable to help himself, he spits out, voice pressured, “Not forever. What do you know? Maybe it’ll pass again, yeah. Maybe not. You know, maybe it _is_ time to finally off myself!”

“Woah!” Sara says in loud response, and John falls silent. He feels numb, having said the words, and he probably shouldn't have said them. A good way to get people scared is to talk about dying, even though it’s what every life is going towards. Some people’s lives are just shorter than others. “Woah, hey, no.”

“What, I’m a horse now?” John mutters. 

His attempt to lighten the mood fails. Sara shakes John’s wrists. “Hey, look at me.”

Reluctantly, he does. Sara’s face is flushed and her gaze is intense bordering on desperate, the kind of deep feelings John should be having but isn't. 

“John. Listen. It’s going to pass. You’re going to get help.”

John gives her a vague frown. He really shouldn’t have said what he said. Made her think he’s gone mad, he has. “What do you mean help?” 

“I mean we’re going to get you through this. We’re going to figure something out. You’ve taken medication before, right? You’ve been in...treatment?”

John didn’t know his stomach could sink any further than it already has, but apparently it can. “I don’t want to go back to the loony bin,” John whispers, and he is far gone, because his voice sounds completely pathetic and he can’t care. He knows that if he got delivered to some hospital right now he’d probably check himself in just because he doesn’t have the energy to do anything else, but the idea of being locked up again in a place full of people he doesn’t know and who have no idea what he is or what he’s capable of makes him desperately want to die, even if the point is that they won’t let him. “I want to stay here.”

Sara gives him a small, relieved smile, and the panic he was starting to feel pricking at his throat subsides. “I know. I want you to stay here too. I don’t mean we’re gonna drop you off at a hospital. I’m saying that maybe to get you through this we can figure out what worked before, and...okay, I think you might need to see someone, but it doesn’t mean we’re going to dump you somewhere, okay? If that’s not what you want. You’re part of this team.”

“They could take me,” John says, swallowing hard. His eyes drift down to Sara’s hands around his wrists, and his breath catches as he imagines the leather cuffs at Ravenscar. “Section me. It’s happened before.”

“We have time couriers, so I’d really like to see them try.”

John almost laughs at that, though he doesn’t come close to smiling.

He looks back at Sara.

When he does, for the first time in weeks he feels something approaching hope, because even though John doesn’t know what to think anymore, or, frankly, how to think anymore, Sara’s giving him a look like she knows what she’s doing and, in spite of the fact that he’s sure she doesn’t, he might as well believe she’ll figure something out. They’ll figure something out. 

He’s sure that tomorrow he’ll still feel like hell, and he doesn’t know how much longer he can live with it, but there’s a chance he’s willing to take that he won’t actually have to live with it much longer, so maybe he’ll give it some time until the best outcome is one where next year on May 10th he’s alive and well on the Waverider. 

(There’s no such thing as fate anymore. When he was nine he put the knife aside, and he’s done that every time since.) 

“You think I’ll be okay,” John whispers like he’s telling a secret, and Sara nods. 

“Yeah, I do. You have me. You have us, and trust me, we are all in your corner.”

Maybe she’s right. He’s got people on his side. People who can take care of themselves. People who he’s trusted with his life, and who have trusted him with their lives, for some reason, but the point is that maybe he can trust them with his life again. 

“Just don’t let them lock me up,” John says.

“I won’t.”

John takes a deep breath, and his body droops. “I’m tired,” he murmurs, tugging at Sara’s hands.

“If I let you go, will you hit yourself again?” Sara asks, and John groans and rolls his head back.

“No, I’m too bloody tired.”

Sara snorts. “Fine.” She lets his wrists go, and, because apparently at some point the numbness covered his whole body, he nearly falls. Sara grabs his shoulders from the back to steady him. “Oookay, time to go to sleep,” she mutters, leading him over to the medchair.

He doesn’t protest even though the thing’s uncomfortable. Not like he cares.

He lies down, crosses his arms, and turns his head to look at Sara, who’s sitting on the other chair, her legs hanging over the side. “You staying?” he mumbles, and she nods. 

“Yep.”

“Great. I’ll probably have nightmares.”

“I’ll wake you up.”

John gives her half a smile, because he’s not excited to go to sleep, and the last thing he wants to do is wake up, and he’ll probably put his fist through a mirror before tomorrow’s done, but at least he doesn’t have to do it alone. 

“Thanks, Sara.”

She smiles back. “Get some rest, Johnny.”

He closes his eyes.

_Get some rest._

Yeah. He might as well. 

Tomorrow he’s going to have to get up.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, and feedback is always appreciated. 
> 
> And thanks to within_a_dream for the beta read and the cheerleading.


End file.
